[note: If you've already been through the introductionthis link will take you
directly to a selection point
for the further sections of this thesis]

THE SETTING FOR A PERCEPTION

We are creatures of Earth, bearing a
certain intimate relationship to the nature of this particular
planet. This is not hard to establish. We live within a narrow
spectrum of temperature variation, we breathe an oxygen-rich
mixture of gases characteristic of Earth's atmosphere, our
well-being is restricted to equally limited ranges of gravity,
solar radiation and other terrestrial forces that we take for
granted. It is irrational to suppose that we were lucky enough to
"happen upon" the rare planet that supports life as we know it;
rather, our being is attuned very finely to the nature of this
singular orb. Reality for us, as for all the creatures who share
it here, is narrowly limited to the reality that prevails on
Earth.

I open this thesis in the history of ideas with
such an all-encompassing statement in order to emphasize at once
our degree of identity with all other life forms on the planet,
not only as to conditions of existence but also as to parameters
of reality. For we are going to concern ourselves with a single
defining element in this shared reality that comes under the
heading, above noted, of "other terrestrial forces that we take
for granted."

The subject is Time. Not as a physical constant
(if such a thing indeed exists), but as a condition of periodicity.
That is to say, as it appears subjectively to us here on
Earth.

It might seem odd, on first notice, that time in
any form at all should be regarded as a defining or qualificational
aspect of reality. The common notion of time considers it merely a
dimension, like space -- a limitless containment within which all
aspects of reality are merely situate, either pin-pointed or
stretched along its linear continuum but not in any way given
characteristic by it. But if we consider the way in which we know
time, we shall quickly see it to be otherwise.

By cosmic happenstance, as it were, Earth pursues
three motional periodicities from which most of our very singular
notions of time are derived. 1) An axial rotation brings a regular
cycle of day and night that we have evenly divided into 24 hours. 2)
In roughly 365 of these revolvements Earth completes an orbit around
the sun, giving us our notion of the year. 3) In the course of our
year there is a secondary periodicity caused by the tilt of our
rotational axis to a modest 23.5 degrees. The orientation of this
tilt is not to the sun, but to the orbital plane, which results in
the subjectively perceived effect of a year-long wobble cycle,
familiarly seen as the cycle of the seasons.

To note the particularity of our
situation once more, it didn't have to be as it is, here on Earth.
The other planets have axial tilts that range from a mere 3
degrees to a whopping 177 degrees. It is hardly necessary to
observe that our familiar seasons could be vastly different from
what they are.

The seasonal periodicity is of singular
importance to the present study, for we shall be looking at the
"seasonality" of experience. The province of this paper is the
influence of the annual seasonal round upon non-agricultural human
affairs, and the extent of both subliminal and lost cultural
awareness of such influence.

Seasonality is essentially an agricultural concept
in our world, with little more than metaphoric application to other
human affairs. Or it references a time of year, but without much more
significance than the mere calendar placement. But a closer look at
the term reveals other dimensions. The root word, season, derives
from the Latin sation-em, the act of sowing, and was later
extended to the idea of ripening, or becoming "seasoned." In this
form it found a wider range of utility in human affairs, applying
easily to anything which can be said to go through a maturational
process. Hence, we have not only seasoned wood, but seasoned
ball-players, ripening relationships, overly-ripe investments,
well-seasoned ideas, etc.

It is this ripening aspect that differentiates
seasonality from periodicity or simple cyclicity. The seasonal year,
in other words, is not just a repeating cycle of change but a
process of maturational growth in periodic stages. The
distinction is critical, for it adds a qualitative dimension to time
that is conceptually as removed from the purely cyclic as the cyclic
is removed from the linear.

Nor is growth, alone, the qualifying feature.
Maturation further connotes a sense of completion, of fullness, of
"arrival," which serves to remove it from the realm of the purely
mechanical and lends it a value-orientation.

It's possible to describe the distinction
between a ripening and a cycle in other ways. For illustrative
purpose, the cycle is often portrayed as a sine-wave curve, the
familiar "S" shape turned on its side, which features -- if only
in idealized form -- a climbing course that is mirror-imaged in
its subsequent descent. The ripening curve, if given a stylized
image, would have no such descent, but would reach a plateau and
then begin again at base, somewhat in the form of a cresting and
breaking ocean wave.

Because of this difference, any assignment of
beginning or end, on the cyclic path, is often purely arbitrary,
whereas there is a normative point on the repeating
ripening curve that can be so indicated. To emphasize the point
once more, this is a notation of quality rather than mere
quantification.

The sense of fullness or completion is perfectly
apparent in any agricultural context, where ripeness is understood as
having exactly that meaning. Ripeness when used outside of an
agricultural context, however -- and the term "seasoned," as well --
has been severed from its calendar connection. It will be the purpose
of this paper to show that the connection has been, in other
cultures, a common perception . . . that the seasonal calendar has
been understood to apply as readily to the organic ripening of human
activity as to agricultural growth.

It is entirely possible, to be sure, that the
claimed effect is an interaction between seasonality and
consciousness, such that the maturation of human affairs is a
perceptual assessment with no basis in actuality. But if, on that
account, we should discount its reality-effectiveness, then the very
contribution of mental patterning to the social construction of
reality must be thrown open to challenge. I believe, however, that
the evidence will rather indicate a perception of nature that has
simply been lost to us.

Whether a function of consciousness or of nature
itself, this ripening aspect of development, to whatever extent it is
perceived, has come to be regarded as a strictly biological function,
merely situated in time. Where it manifests in a
non-biological context, we give no thought at all to a possible
source in nature. The boundaries of materialistic dualism prevent us
from any such recognition, and it thus escapes any systematic
investigation. Plainly put, any ripening process other than
biological is regarded as entirely separate from nature's organic
influence.

It remains, of course, to demonstrate evidence of
this relationship, which is one of the tasks that this paper
undertakes. And as the present effort is organized around the history
of ideas, it will be its further task to illuminate evidence of an
early and widespread cultural recognition of the general maturational
effect of seasonal time. The two concerns, in fact, are
inseparable.

The implications of any discovery that time has an
inherent kind of quality, as well as (and possibly in place of!) a
quantity, must necessarily be profound, and they are not the province
of this paper. Nor will this effort attempt to show any scientific
basis for the indicated effect. It will be a sufficient task merely
to present the evidence and the inference that such a
seasonal/ripening relationship, originating at a deeper or more
cosmic level than the merely physiological, does exist.

NATURE, LIFE AND REALITY

We need first to seek a normalizing
definition for two terms that will receive much usage in this
inquiry: nature and reality. They are terms so
loosely and broadly employed in modern life that no thesis
engaging them can assume that they will be readily understood as
per the author's intent. It is doubtful, in fact, that any precise
usage can be maintained, even with the best of intentions; but we
should begin, at least, with a degree of clarity as to how those
terms are intended.

Nature is generally seen in one of two
broad contexts: either as "out there" to be mastered, kept at bay and
profitably used; or as "out there" to be protected, savored, enriched
by. It is understood that we are, in some indisputably large way,
"part of nature," but nevertheless sufficiently distinct from it as
to be able to hold such separatist attitudes as each of those is.
Even naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch (If you don't mind my
saying so, pp. 336-7), in
drawing down his own definition, lets it revolve around the
distinction made evident by "that part of the world which man did not
make and which has not been fundamentally changed by him." And he
goes on to observe that while "man is, of course, himself a part of
nature . . . he is also in so many ways so unique that it is
convenient to speak of man and nature."

Such a view, while difficult to disagree with, is
grounded in an anthrocentric perspective that views nature as the
embedding medium, and evaluates human-kind, then, as either within or
outside of it, or even as having some ability to escape its province.
But nature is not such a containment, any more than life, itself, can
be said to "contain" certain things (such as animals or people) and
not other things (such as stones and clouds). Rather, some things are
infused with life; and in the same sense, every living thing
is infused with nature, governed by its laws and informed by its
processes.

I must allow that non-living things are also
infused with nature, but somehow not in the same degree or essential
that is the concern of our inquiry. Hence, my particular use of
nature is almost synonymous with life itself; and here it may be
necessary to make note of the distinction between life and
individual lives. A given life is only the embodied timeframe
during which nature's process -- called life -- takes place. And this
is where we make our primary distinction: Life is the format for the
manifestation of Nature, as I shall be using the term. Life is not
enacted within nature; nature is manifesting through life. To define
nature without reference to life, in this perspective, would be about
as meaningless as defining life without reference to living things.
And to define life, on the other hand, without reference to nature
would be sheerly impossible.

In taking this approach -- that nature is
within the human rather than the other way around -- we somewhat
free ourselves from the often ego-burdened controversy of whether
humankind is part of, or separate from, the animal world. That
controversy could very easily prove a stumbling block to what I am
endeavoring to bring out, for my thesis posits a certain level of
necessary equivalence between the human and other elements (both
plant and animal) of the perceived natural world.

I am not unmindful of the extensive
philosophical implications of such a conceptual switch, but they
are not to be pursued here. The within-nature or
separate-from-nature controversy has plagued speculative
philosophy from the time of Plato, and it is rash to suppose that
it might be so easily disposed of, even though my resolution feels
sound enough. By claiming the temporary ground of a
supposed resolution, this paper establishes a neutral
relationship to the controversy which enables it to better focus
on substantiating its thesis.

Fully aside from those considerations, this
definition of nature is integrally necessary to the process we'll be
looking at -- a nature that works internally to impose reality
as insistently upon human life as upon other life. A kind of reality,
I should categorically say, that cannot be "sheltered against." One
doesn't "turn off" the sense of Spring, to apply an instant example.
It is as much a reality as the bursting blossoms that accompany it.
But to assume that it's a reaction to those blossoms is simply an
associative construct that has never been challenged.

The "sense of Spring" is often referenced
poetically, and in idle romantic allusion, but never considered as an
actual event in internal reality. So we don't know how to
define it in terms of reality. Can it be called a motivational
reality? Or perhaps an "impulsional" reality? These assignments are
outside the range of how we ordinarily define reality -- which is
within a schema traceable to our insistence on mastery of the
environment. So long as reality is purely physical (i.e., "real" in a
physical sense) we do not compromise the primacy of reason and free
will in the contest we regularly wage with the world at large. For
animals, such elements as motivation and impulse are assigned to
instinct, but the closest comparable category for human beings is a
biological drive. The sense of Spring is clearly not a biological
drive . . . so it fails to qualify as reality.

Our usage of reality, then, will encompass
a range of subtleties of this nature: internal realities that have
commonly been projected outward, grafted onto the external
environment. But not these alone. It would not be possible to
consistently project internal reality on the outside world if there
were not concurrent and related events, supportive of such a
projection, actually happening in the "real world" -- events
that we would never suppose were causally attributable to a seasonal
effect, but which would easily qualify as seasonal in the framework
of a ripening in human affairs. Such parallels do, in fact, occur and
with remarkable frequency, and I shall be developing material that
will bear this out.

There are two possible ways to account for such
things, and both are problematical. One is to premise a metaphysical
material/psychic interface for which we have no present proof. The
other, even more in a "twilight zone," is to suggest that human
events in the outer world, at least some of them, are somehow brought
to phenomenal actualization by the ripening seasonal force of nature
itself. I will explore these questions as they develop for us. They
are noted here only by way of indicating how the term "reality" will
be employed in this thesis.

I have not actually made a clear
statement of thesis yet, and it may be time to do so. It must be
obvious, by now, that I embark on a voyage of discovery in largely
uncharted waters -- regions that have not hosted scholarly
inquiry, very largely because of the bordered limits of western
science and rationalism. But these borders have increasingly been
challenged in recent decades for their arbitrary rigidity, and I
am encouraged that my "vessel of discovery" will at least not sink
of its own weight. It may be that I've delayed the thesis
statement so as to gain sufficient introductory ballast, if I may
maintain the metaphor, to assure the sea-worthiness of my
proposition:

STATEMENT OF
THESIS

THE SEASONAL ASPECT OF
TERRESTRIAL TIME IS A NATURE-INHERENT RIPENING PROCESS INFLUENCING
HUMAN LIFE AT PERCEPTUAL AND MOTIVATIONAL LEVELS, AND REFLECTING
SOMEHOW IN THE ACTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF EXTERNAL EVENTS. THIS HAS BEEN
SENSED BY, OR CONSCIOUSLY KNOWN TO, EARLIER CULTURES, AND THERE ARE
DOCUMENTARY TRACES AND ARTIFACTUAL REMNANTS OF THAT AWARENESS
AVAILABLE TO US.

The development
of the thesis will be pursued as follows:

Part
II will survey the tradition of
nature that has come down to us, and how, in many respects, that
tradition has served to perpetuate a certain distancing from
nature, denying us any threshold from which we might apprehend a
deeper seasonal relationship.

Part
III will examine mythological roots
that take us back to a time when Time was seen in a thoroughly
different context from today, and we shall consider the conceptual
shifts this reveals to us.

Part
IV will look at the irrational
historic roots of modern science, and consider certain cultural
artifacts from this earliest of documented times that provide
illumination for our inquiry.

Part
V explores three of the earliest
calendars available to us, which exhibit a diversity both as to
geographical origin and as to cultural basis and usage. Yet, they
will be shown to demonstrate certain strong commonalities which
appear to support the thesis, and from which an archetypal
seasonal or maturational cycle can be surmised.

Part
VI will go into this archetypal
cycle in some detail, culling indication of its validity from a
variety of contemporary sources, and we shall conclude by
annotating indications of an indigenous awareness of the seasonal
influence, even in recent times, from the ethnographic
literature.